Attendance: 72

Invocation: Randy Polston

Greeters: Tracy Furnivall, Jason Gergely

Guests: Karin Hamilton (Jeurgen Voss), Scott Clay and Scott Skiles (Jeff Owens), Paul Finley (Heather Smith), daughter Samantha (Mark Marley)

Birthdays: Tracy Furnivall, Ivan Schuler, Jody Claypool, Chris Shipley, John Kirkpatrick, Bret Wolf, Dan Davis, David Meier

Announcements: 1) TriStar basketball is coming up Sunday February 24 at the Baker Youth Club, for ages 8-13. Participants do not need to pre-register. Contact Chris Wiggins for more details. 2) Doc Haines said there will be a murder mystery at the Wagon Wheel Theater February 22 and 23. He and Glen Hall are starring. The play is “Murder on the S.S. Amore,” with audience participation. Tickets may be purchased at the Wagon Wheel center for the Arts Box Office, $20/person. Dress is cruise wear. 3) Tracy Furnivall said the BYC is having a fundraiser this gFriday. Go to BYC.cbo.io to bid on the auction items.

50/50(Kristin Farwell): Art Gakstatter won!

Sergeants: Mitch Goon fined Scott Wiley for his paisley shirt, Tracy Furnivall for not being at the Octagon Club, Coach Kessler for retiring (Coach got a standing ovation!), Ken Anderson for being in movies and Larry Bishop. John Elliott gave a happy dollar for comparing his retirement outfit with Coach Kessler’s.

Membership (Joey Hickerson): 2nd reading: Paul Finley (Heather Smith)

Induction: Past president John Sullivan inducted Karin Hamilton (Juergen Voss)

Program: Optimist member, and CEO of Network Computer Solutions, Mark Marley was our speaker. He talked about the Dark Web. To give background he said he was in the Marines during desert storm and kept the computers working despite 130 degree heat and lots of sand. There was no theft of data under his watch. He did IT consulting in Southern California after that and found out that the private sector, particularly medical and legal businesses, were not as up to speed with data security as the military and government. He said cybercrime is on the rise with 80% of hacks being due to password leaks, and 85% of businesses with less than 1000 employees have been hacked. The global cost of cybercrime is $2.1 trillion by 2019. This leads to the Dark Web which he compared to Amazon, where people can buy passwords (and other things like drugs). With one password thieves can do “credential stuffing,” where they can look at one password and figure out trends, like if you add a pound sign to a basic password. Therefore he recommended never using the same password for each website (many people in the club do that). Universities are at risk; Mark explained that with passwords bought on the Dark Web, thieves can get into Financial Aid departments and have the money directed to them rather than the student. Banking is at risk; Wells Fargo for example had a major breach recently. His said consumers are using this information to decide where to do their banking. Governments are at risk. Mark gave the example of the cyberattack on the city of Atlanta. Multiple municipal services were down, years’ worth of data were destroyed and the city spent $2.7 million in recovering services. Schools are at risk; they get ransomed and can’t open their data bases (so they can’t teach). Businesses are at risk. he gave a n example of an employee responding to a phishing attempt. The company sued the employee. Her defense was she didn’t receive proper training in recognizing phishing attempts. Even the Optimists are at risk! Mark recommended never using the same password, train your employees to recognize phishing attempts and use multifactor authentication like “geotracking” or “Duo.com”. He recommended SpotLight or Lifelock to protect your data. He said in this day and age that is real life insurance. To remember passwords he recommended 1password.com. He can be contacted at 574-527-0659 or mark@NCShelpdesk.com

IMPORTANT DATES: Car Show, Sunday May 19; Triathlon, Saturday June 22, and Golf Outing Monday September 9. Please mark your calendars!